Florida's citrus industry is still suffering from Hurricane Irma

Marketplace – November 27, 2017

When Hurricane Irma made landfall in Southwest Florida on Sept. 10, the state’s citrus groves were hit especially hard. And they were already vulnerable, after more than a decade of struggle against a devastating crop disease. Hurricane Irma’s severe winds, rain and flooding left extensive damage in the groves, which growers say will take years to recover.

Paul Meador, a fourth-generation citrus grower, has spent the last two and a half months assessing damage and supervising cleanup of his family’s groves and logistics facilities across Southwest Florida. The company, Everglades Harvesting & Hauling, supplies juice oranges to Florida’s Natural coop. His operation has 50 full-time employees and typically hires about 500 seasonal workers on temporary work visas to pick and process fruit. It is based in LaBelle, Florida, in Hendry County, northeast of Marco Island, where Hurricane Irma came ashore after first crossing the Florida Keys.

One of Meador’s groves occupies 500 acres east of Naples, Florida. It’s surrounded by small canals, dense forest and swampland.

“This is where the eye wall of the storm passed over,” said Meador, pointing to a row of toppled orange trees, with fallen fruit and leaves still scattered on the ground. “We’ve cleaned up a lot already, but there’s a lot of broken limbs laying around. We have two front-end loaders that have been working here for over a month.”

He pointed to one front loader, carrying a huge uprooted orange tree to dump on a burn pile.

“That’s one of thousands that we’ll be removing in this block,” he said.

“A lot of our best-producing trees have been destroyed, so we have to replant the trees that are gone, and those were the workhorses that really generated money for us. I would guess that two-thirds of our crop is gone — either because of tree loss or the fruit was shaken out of the trees. So now we have to fund another entire crop year. It’s going to be a very challenging 24 months to come.”

It’s also a challenging time for seasonal agricultural workers who pick the oranges, said Gerardo Reyes Chavez. He’s an organizer for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a farmworker advocacy group that helps poor, mostly Latino immigrant laborers in South Florida’s citrus and tomato fields.

“You cannot replant a tree,” said Reyes Chavez, who has spent time working in the orange groves that surround the town of Immokalee. The harvest season usually starts mid-October. “That’s a season that’s completely destroyed for all the orange groves. Thousands of workers without a job — it’s hard.”

Andrew Meadows, a spokesman for Florida Citrus Mutual, a trade organization for growers, points out that even before the hurricane there were problems.

“We were facing the fight of our lives before Irma,” he said. “A dozen years ago we were producing 242 million boxes of oranges. Last year we produced about 69 million boxes. Some of that is due to development, some is due to previous hurricanes. But a large portion of it is due to HLB.”

HLB is the abbreviation for a plant disease called Huanglongbing, or citrus greening. It’s caused by a bacteria spread by a tiny invasive insect that saps the orange trees of nutrients, ruining the fruit and weakening the trees. There’s no cure for citrus greening, but agricultural scientists have made significant progress to mitigate its damage for growers like Meador, whose trees were developing a healthy crop this year.

“We were hoping that this was going to be a rebound year,” Meadows said. “Unfortunately, Irma came through, and we took one step forward and maybe five steps back.”

Meadows predicts growers statewide will end up losing more than half of this year’s crop to Hurricane Irma. The Florida Commissioner of Agriculture has estimated the cost of Irma to Florida’s farm sector at $2.5 billion, with projected losses to citrus producers the worst of any sector, at $760 million.

“When a tree sits in water for two, three, four days, it destroys the root system and kills the tree,” Meadows said. “We won’t know the true effects of Irma until a year or two from now. So that $760 million is expected to grow. And if we don’t receive a relief-rebuild package, there’s going to be a mass exodus from the industry.”